Hair brushes have been available for decades. In spite of this fact, the present invention provides features which have not been heretofore known. To appreciate the significance of the present invention, it is helpful to discuss the development of hair brush art.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,123,044 shows a multiple unit brush wherein if the units are sufficiently spaced apart and the holding screws are sufficiently loose, the brushes may rotate with respect to each other and with respect to the handle. In this case, the brushes are either free wheeling or nonrotatable. The free wheeling option is possible only if each brush is sufficiently spaced so that it doesn't interfere with an adjacent brush and if the holding screws are only loosely tightened. Rotary brushes did not progress further than this design until the present invention, and the brush of U.S. Pat. No. 2,123,044 is not now available and likely was not particularly well received because the non-rotatable option is no different from any brush, while the rotatable option is free wheeling which is generally not very useful in a brush.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,183,139 a few years later provided another hair brush having a plurality of cylindrical brushes. These brushes, however, were not rotatable, and the novelty of design was found in the mechanism which allowed brush replacement.
Later art developed in the area of a single cylindrical brush and involved a variety of minor features. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,343,782 shows a hair brush having bristles attached in a spiral pattern. U.S. Pat. No. 2,648,082 shows a cylindrical hair brush which is split and can be separated into a pair of semi-cylindrical brushes. A more recent brush is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,843,990 wherein the support for the bristles is elastically deformable so that as bristles apply greater force, they may deform at the support and release the tangled hair against which the force is being applied. A more recent disclosure, U.S. Pat. No. 4,076,032, shows a vented cylindrical hair brush for use with blow styling.
Thus, rotatable brushes were recognized at an early date but generally were not developed into a device having any significant advantage over conventional brushes. In fact, the art developed away from rotatable brushes, as evidenced by the deformable support of U.S. Pat. No. 3,843,990. Hence, the present invention is a departure from decades of hair brushes and is actually an improvement over a very early brush.